Just by waiting me out, he got a few things off me. That I liked to draw. He asked if he could see some of my so-called work, and I said not at this time. Lately I’d been studying on the human form, aka this girl in all my classes they called Hot Sauce that sat in a chair the way ice cream melts. Soft porn basically. He gave me a pass, but said he would need to see some drawings by the end of the week, no excuses. Like it was an assignment.
That freaked me out. I went through all the notebooks I still had, going back as far as Creaky Farm and the every-night comics of Fast Man saving the kids. Nothing for a teacher to see. I got nervous, then pissed off, and then thought fine, the man wants to get in my skullbox, here you go. I brought him superhero shit. Kids getting saved. He studied over my drawings like he’s reading the damn paper, then said he had some assessments for me to do. I thought, Good, we’re almost done here: more tests, more Titanic of Demon going down in a shit ocean.
Wrong. The ones he gave me were all picture tests. Example: here’s some connected squares that are an unfolded box, pick which box it would be after you put it back together. Pages and pages of this crap, so easy it’s like a game. It was the only test I’d finished in forever. I thought it was a warmup for the real tests. Wrong again. Mr. Armstrong tricked me. These were the special ones they use for Gifted and Talented, which he said I was. Which is ridiculous. All the sudden he’s talking about what catching up I’ll have to do, and if I move into this track in middle school, I can take art class in high school instead of making birdhouses in shop.
I was pretty upset about it. Getting used to all new everything was screwing with my head. Clothes, people, house. The one thing I could still count on was being an idiot. Now I was supposed to trash what little there was left of Demon and be smart. Would I still be me? And the main question: Can a Gifted and Talented play football? Doubtful. But Mr. Armstrong moved me into the better English class and signed me up for math tutoring, which turned out to be just me and six righteously hot girls, so I decided what the hell. Next year I’d be on down the road in some other placement and school, where nobody would know how smart I ever was or wasn’t.
My gifts and talents were discovered by others. The first was this guy Fish Head, that had perfected the exact combination of BO and Axe spray to fend off attackers. It was a normal day in math, with me covering notebook pages with drawings because we did smoke-all in that class. Mrs. Jackson would pass out her worksheets and then read a paperback or paint her nails for the rest of the period. To this day, adding up numbers puts that sharp polish smell in my head. This is still the dummy class obviously. I was doing the math tutoring, but it had yet to take.
“Hey Demon, drawl me some different kind of pussies right quick!” Fish Head whispered, and by “whisper,” I mean the entire back of the class laughed.
I was not that acquainted with pussies to know there were different kinds. I asked did he mean like shaved or not shaved, but no. He had names for different types. “Like tits,” he said. “You know how they’s as many kinds of tits as they is kinds of cars?”
I’d never really thought about it. Not that I was admitting to that.
“Like your long low ones.” Fish Head, not being great with words, was trying to explain with his hands. Other guys jumped in to help. “Slab sides, pontoons,” they said. “Vans.”
Somebody had a Playboy, worth a thousand words like they say. I only got to keep it till the end of class, but I can study a thing and keep it in my mind’s eye. I started charging guys for these drawings, fifty cents for parts, a dollar a whole body. Minus the face. For faces and hands I would have to charge extra because they take the most time, and there was no interest. Then I told these guys I needed to keep their magazines overnight, to get better familiar on the different makes and models. My chassis fixation took a new turn.
The one thing I could count on, surprisingly, turned out to be Angus. I’d not had any friend since Maggot, and that had been awhile. You don’t just hang out with a girl normally, but in no way shape or form did Angus seem like one. It wasn’t even the kick-ass boots or knowing cars. It was the zero bullshit. If you ever met a middle school girl, you know what they are: volcano eruptions of bullshit. Every minute a new emergency, the best friend turned enemy. Some guy that was flirting yesterday, now talking to some other girl. Every body part too big or too small and oh I hate this dress and Lord what if I’m pregnant. My own girl experience didn’t run that deep, I mainly knew this from Angus. She had no tolerance, and needed to gripe. A lot.
“So I told Michaela, look, your ass is your ass. Simple fact. It’s going to look that way whether you’re wearing those particular jeans or not, so why keep asking me?”
“ ‘Or not,’ ” I said, “is something to picture.”
“Don’t go there, young friend.”
Too late, I already had. Artist’s rendition. Angus wouldn’t know this, being no part of the Fish Head crowd, but the Ass of Michaela was a legend in its time.
Angus paused her gripe to hand me a leaf bag, Mattie Kate being on a tear that fall about raking up the yard. Maybe just wanting us out of her hair while she vacuumed, or not in Angus’s room on PlayStation all hours. Raking leaves though. There’s always more going to fall. I shoved leaves in those bags till they were dead packed, like bags of bricks. My disposal experience was vast. “Okay,” I said. “You preached. Check Michaela off your ass-pain list.”
“Oh, no. This is not Mario where you blast the Goomba and it’s gone. Michaela is the undead of Monkey Island. She keeps coming back.”
My choice for those leaves would have been arson, but the county had outdoor burning laws, and Angus as far as legal shit was a freaking cop. It made no sense, given the whole thugged-outedness of her, but her worry was Coach. He could lose his job in a heartbeat.
“So we’re in PE, I’m minding my own beeswax, and here comes Donna.” (Cue the Minnie Mouse voice.) “ ‘Elizabeth told me Michaela said to tell you she’s not talking to you.’ And I’m like, I’m sorry, was Michaela under the impression I wanted conversation? I was assigned to her as partners on our Antarctica project because Mr. Norwood gives me the charity cases, and Michaela thinks penguins live at the North Pole with Santa’s motherfucking elves.”
You had to be amazed any girl would try, but some did. Maybe because of Coach, anything in his orbit being godlike. Or maybe it was Angus they wanted a piece of, the attitude, clothes, whatever. Doomed efforts. She did have guy friends, nerds and gamers, this Sax individual that played drums. Most guys though were terrified of Angus. Me included. But with Coach permanently checked out, it left a gap. The deeper we went into fall, the less we saw of him at home. The Generals were undefeated, opponents falling one by one, and every soul in Lee County dead proud. At practice, the smallest screwup would mean an extra half hour of suicides up the bleachers and Coach shitting his mood all over the grass. One man’s fail is every man’s punishment, a team is a body, etc. At home he lived in his office watching replays. He never even knew about the Mr. Armstrong business, he just signed the forms without looking.
I admitted it to Angus, and it turned out she was a Gifted and Talented. No surprise, she was a reader like Tommy but more adult ones like sci-fi and female-type shit that could scare the hair off your balls, titles alone. Her scariness pertained to taking apart everything she looked at. Not just amateurs like Michaela, I mean people on TV. Like if we’re watching some show and a girl is ugly, glasses, etc., Angus would say, Okay, watch. They’ll make her the smart one. If a foreigner, possibly the villain. Angus could wreck a show like nobody’s business. If a character ever turned up that talked like us, country-type person, he was there for one reason only, stupidness. Wait for it . . . joke! He’s a dumbass! If a girl, worse. She thinks condoms are party balloons and the guy trying to get in her pants is just the sweetest li’l ol’ gentleman. Angus couldn’t believe I’d never noticed this before. You get so used to not even being anything on TV, I guess I was just like, Yay, country kid gets invited to the party!
She gave me the advice of not freaking out over Gifted and Talented. No big deal, they pull you out of class to do stuff that’s interesting. At Easter break you go on a trip. The ocean? She said possibly. One time it was to Stone Mountain, Georgia, which is practically as far. So the ocean was not out of the running. That would be something. If I was still around next spring, and got my math shit together, and pulled out of the bonehead zone. A lot of ifs.
In the meantime I had to figure out how to live in that big house with Angus, because Coach only came out like a bear from his cave to chew up dinner and crunch his PBR can in his fist and leave it on the table. The big square teeth looked to be hurting his mouth at all times. Angus told me they weren’t his teeth, by the way. He’d worn dentures since high school after he lost his whole front row biting off more end-zone turf one time than he could chew.
Another by-the-way she told me was her real name. Agnes. Some kids in first grade turned it around to tease her, and to shut them up she said she liked Angus better. Then decided she really did. Likewise, her daddy used to take her to every practice and game, sitting her up on his shoulders. Coach’s girl, in her tiny Generals jersey some lady made for her, riding high for all to see. Then in fifth grade he stopped letting her come to practices because it was no place for a young lady. She said fine, she hated football. Then decided she really did. And that’s the story on a motherless girl named Angus. Unbeatable. Coach was a big guy with big hands holding the world by its neck, with every game a win or else the world ends. Storm in a shot glass type of thing. And Angus was the opposite. A whole ocean, dark and chill.
31
Through some cousin or another, the Peggots tracked me down in Jonesville and called the house. Mattie Kate passed the phone over without a word, and the voice of Mrs. Peggot knocked the wind out of me. Wanting to know was I all right. Oh, I had answers, starting with “Now you care,” but instead I got choked up. Yes, I did want to see Maggot and her and Mr. Peg. I would see if I could get a ride over there. On Saturday, after football practice.
I knew Coach would make U-Haul drive me if I asked, and he did. U-Haul sat outside in the car waiting the whole time, so it was like the old days of supervised visits, only not really, because U-Haul had no power. I stayed for dinner.
The Peggots crowded around me like I’d come back from the moon. Mrs. Peggot saying how big I’d got, Maggot shocking me with how different he looked, serious raccoon eyes with the makeup, two earrings in his bottom lip. They asked about Jonesville and Coach and my grandmother Betsy and how come she was to take an interest in me after all this time. I said probably because she didn’t know I existed till I showed up in her yard looking like dog vomit.
“No,” Mrs. Peggot said. “That isn’t so. She knew about you.”
They got quiet. Mr. Peg looked at her. She nodded. And then in the Peggot kitchen after twelve years of life, I finally got the true story on my grandmother coming to have words with Mom. Not the day I was born, but some weeks prior. A car came up the holler that nobody had seen before. “It was a Chevy wagon,” Mr. Peg said. “With some sassy little gal a-driving it.”
Mrs. Peggot swatted his arm because she wanted to tell it. “It was a little gal driving, and a great big tall lady that got out and went up there to see your mama.”
“Then that little gal gets out and opens the back door, and what do you think is in there?”
Mrs. Peggot knuckled him again. “In the back seat, here sits the littlest old fellow you ever saw. A grown man, but he’s real small, some way.”
I knew that man. But didn’t say so. Not wanting a swat.
“He didn’t get out. Them two stayed down there the whole time smoking their cigarettes. Little sass of a gal, leaning on that big car like she just dared anybody to say a word about it.”
“But did you . . .” I didn’t even know what I wanted to know.
“Honey, we had never seen the like of these people. We just waited for that lady to come back out. And then they went on their way.”
She said Mom got tetchy afterwards and told the neighbors it was none of their business. But Mrs. Peggot got out of her that it was her dead boyfriend’s mother poking around, wanting to take away the baby. Back in summer he’d written her a letter saying he was partially sorry for everything, and going to be a daddy, come November. He asked, did she want to come see her grandbaby then. He and my grandmother were on the verge of making up their twenty-years fight. Then after he wrote her, he died, so. Bad timing. You could see how it would piss her off.
